1st Sunday after
Christmas – C
Luke 2:41-52
December 30, 2012
Luke 2:41-52
December 30, 2012
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
1st United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
1st United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Growing
Pains
If you’re a parent of a
teenager, you’ve been there. If you’re a teenager, you’ve been there. If you’re a child, you’ve been there. There’s a little something in this story for
everyone.
If you’re a child, you root for
Jesus. For once, the kid has something
to say to his parents for which they have no answer.
If you’re a teenager, well,
you’ve been busted at least once, just like Jesus. Probably, though, your excuse wasn’t as good
as his.
If you’re a parent, you know what
went through the minds (and hearts) of Mary and Joseph. You know the heart-sick anxiety. You’ve made the frantic phone calls as it got
later and there was still no sign of her.
You imagined the worst, told yourself she was fine, then imagined the
worst all over again.
Then, of course, she waltzed
through the door, and anxiety turned instantly to anger—anger for putting you
through it, anger for not realizing how dangerous the world is, anger for being
fragile and careless. “I forgot to
call. What’s the big deal?” And you were speechless. You tried to come up with words to convey the
depth of your love and of your fear and the best you could come up with was, “You’re
grounded until you graduate.”
Mary and Joseph doubtless went
through the same thing. Their words upon
finding Jesus, who it must be remembered had been missing for the better part
of three days, were, "Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your
father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety." I suspect that our writer has cleaned that up
a little. But maybe you could try that response
the next time.
Of course, I suppose you could
ask what kind of parents these were who went a whole day without even noticing that
their child was missing.
In their defense, though, people
in those days travelled in caravans whenever they could. The holy family was no doubt part of a large
group of relatives and neighbors from Nazareth.
Jesus was twelve, a man by some measures. That Joseph and Mary didn’t see him, only
meant that they assumed he was somewhere else in their group.
On realizing that he was not in
fact with the caravan, they dashed back to Jerusalem, finding him finally in
the Temple complex. If I had been Joseph
I suspect I would have felt a little frustrated. What kind of a kid is this, anyway? Kids will do some foolish things—that’s
pretty normal, in fact it’s kind of abnormal if they don’t. But Jesus isn’t mixed up with some girl, or
hanging around a tavern. Instead, he goes
to church.
Karen Chakoian put it well when
she wrote, “It would be like
taking a kid on a class trip to Washington, D.C. and having him get lost, only
to find him chatting with the Supreme Court justices.”[1]
It’s not really what you would
expect of a normal adolescent. But then
maybe the text is telling us that Jesus isn’t a normal adolescent.
We know that it is possible to
tell the Jesus story without any material about his birth or
childhood. Mark and John both did it and
quite well. The stories that we have
from Luke and Matthew are, in one sense, not really necessary for the telling
of the story.
When we write a biography nowadays
we are interested in a person’s childhood because we believe that childhood
experiences shape the adult a person becomes.
For the ancients it was, if anything, the other way around. They believed that a person’s adulthood
identity shaped their childhood experiences.
Luke’s interest in stories about Jesus’ childhood comes from his
conviction that in those stories we will see the emerging adult that Jesus
became. If we want to read this story as
it was written we will read it as telling us something about who the adult
Jesus is.
And when we do, we see
something that maybe we had only guessed at before. For Jesus allegiance to his family is superseded
by his mission. In its earliest days Christianity
was not a religion designed to strengthen families. Later in the gospel when Jesus was told that
his mother and brothers and sisters were there to see him, he replied, “My
mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”[2] In Luke 12 Jesus told of a time when families
will be divided against each other,[3]
presumably over their allegiance to him.
Luke 14 he laid down as a precondition of discipleship that one “hate”
their family members.[4] Now, we read that word “hate” as an
exaggeration, but still, it is clear that, for Jesus, the reign of God holds
first place in his heart. He expects the
same of his disciples.
It is strange is that anyone
would think that the Christian message with its radical demands would
strengthen families. It certainly didn’t
have that reputation in the early centuries of our movement. Time and again we read of young women,
especially, who faced their parents who tried to talk them out of following
Christ. One of the most common arguments
was that, by giving their allegiance to Christ, they had robbed their families
of the reverence that was due to them. That
is why early Christians were known as enemies of piety—they refused to respect
their families.
When Jesus’ parents found him
in the Temple complex deep in conversation with the rabbis and expressed their
anxiety, he calmly replied, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s
house?” Some translations have “about my
Father’s business.” The Greek is not
specific. There is no noun. It simply
says, “in the…of my Father.” Anyway the
point is, Jesus has a calling toward God, but it has little to do with his
family, and certainly not with the man he calls Father.
Jesus says, “Did you not know
that I must be engaged with my Father’s agenda?” and we hear in it a hint of Jesus’
future unswerving allegiance to the reign of God. That hasn’t emerged fully just yet. We’re seeing Jesus’ first steps toward that
end.We’re seeing Jesus’ determination to find out what God wants him to
do. Jesus knows it’s something, but
what?
If Jesus had to struggle to
find his path, how much more do we? We
have to struggle to find our path as Jesus’ disciples. We have to struggle to find our path as a
congregation. None of that is going to
be handed to us. It isn’t going to come
from the Annual Conference center. It
isn’t going to come from the bishop. It
isn’t even going to come from me, as if I were to disappear on retreat for a
few days, talk to God, and come back with “the plan.”
Like Jesus we’ll need to be in
conversation with our tradition. Like
Jesus we’ll need to pay attention to the world around us. Like Jesus we’ll need to be about the things
of our God. As it was for Jesus the
process and result may both be disruptive.
They may not please the bishop or the district superintendent. They may not even please me. But we’re not the ones that this congregation
or its members need to answer to.
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